Lost Man's River(229)
The blind man stifled a red-faced retort. He cleared his throat. “All the same, them fishermen-farmers you call the mob was your family’s neighbors, and good people, too.”
“Good people? Let their young boys run over there and shoot into that body?”
“You sure of that?” The blind man grunted. “One of them boys you always mention was eight years older’n me, and I reckon he stayed that way till the day he died. That would make him about six years of age when he was puttin all them bullets in that body. Course he might of had him a durn popgun or something. Might of shot a cork.” Andy turned his sightless gaze in Lucius’s direction, and his heavy sigh was open warning to distrust anything this young woman might say about the Bay people.
“What was unforgivable,” she persisted, “was putting the blame on Henry Short for shooting Mr. Watson. Henry Short, who never raised his gun!”
Like a manatee breaking the surface, Andy emitted a short emphatic puff. Even her husband protested, “Honey, you don’t know that! Not for sure!”
“Well, that’s what Henry told your father, who told me. Henry swore on his Bible that he never raised his gun.”
Andy leaned back with his hands behind his head. “You’re sayin Henry swore that on the Bible? You pretty sure of that?”
“No, I’m not!” she blurted, close to tears.
“Because Henry was standing right beside my dad,” Andy said carefully, “and my dad told me he seen that rifle comin up, longside of his own.”
Lucius peered at the blind face for some sign of ambiguity. “Why would he raise his gun unless he meant to fire,” he said carefully.
“Maybe he meant to bluff your dad,” Andy said gloomily, looking out to sea. “I never asked him.” He shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, Colonel, then quit askin!” He closed his eyes.
Whidden was eager to show Sally his home coast. Taking advantage of fair weather, they continued south to Lost Man’s River. The water of the Gulf was cloudy green, and its long slow swells swept inshore from distant storms of the Antilles.
A low island rising dead ahead stood out a little from the shore, in the middle of the Lost Man’s River delta. “My dad bought the claim to Lost Man’s Key but built his house south of the river mouth on Lost Man’s Beach,” Whidden told Sally. “Built again after the ’26 Hurricane, built again after the tornado, 1940. He farmed his corn and peas there where I’m pointin at. That little cove back over there was full of fish, so he called it Sadie’s Hole, after my ma.”
“The Carrs called it the same thing,” she said, “because any Carr who tried to sneak in there to fish was asking for a bullet hole from Sadie Harden!”
“Well, after 1929, you might be right, Sal. Course I ain’t no authority on my own family.”
Bougainvillea was resurgent in its red-lavender bowers over the charcoal shadows of Lee Harden’s cabin. There was no trace of Lucius’s small shack, only coast undergrowth. Behind the white ridge of storm-washed shell and sea grape rose the black columns of the coco palms burned by the Park.
“Pioneer families might have no news for many months, the world went past them,” Sally said solemnly. “But those folks knew every shift of wind and turn of current, they could see and smell and listen, and they knew.” She looked from one man to the other, misty-eyed in her evocations of the old traditions. “They just knew.”
“Knew what?” Lucius could not hide his impatience. Yet seeing her so moved by this wild coast, and so embattled by her demons, he stifled his annoyance at her tendency to instruct them in a place and way of life that all three men had known before she was born. Sally was principled and gallant, but her need to right old Island wrongs had killed the fun in her—the tart observations and the goofiness and whimsy which had so delighted him on their journey south.
Whidden was pointing out old landmarks. “See that little stretch of sand nearest the creek mouth? That’s where the Tuckers farmed, and my family, too. Call it Little Creek, had a freshwater spring that Mr. Watson had his eye on. That’s where Tuckers had their garden and that’s where my folks had their farm after 1910.”
“Jim Daniels and his family were living down this beach because his daughter was married to Frank Hamilton,” Lucius reminded them. “His son recalls that the Tuckers were living here on a little sloop. James remembers hearing shots, at least he thinks he does. He says the killer put the bodies aboard Tucker’s little sloop, set her afire, drifted her out to sea. James told me once he’d seen that burning boat himself, he’d seen the smoke of her, offshore.”